Ranking Blog vs Page - pages do way better?

by rritz
14 replies
  • SEO
  • |
Hey folks I have an ongoing discussion with a guy in another forum and he postulated that static webpages will outrank blogs any time.

He said something like - to rank a Wordpress blog you'd have to 'rip the code apart' to SEO it well. He claimed a well build static page will always outrank a CMS blog.

I never heard this theory before, an he has not yet given chapter or verse yet. What do you say to this? Is there aný facts in his statement?
#blog #page #pages #ranking
  • Profile picture of the author mathompson
    i have never do like that. looking for your success and point it, prove it truely
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  • Profile picture of the author irawr
    Banned
    Originally Posted by rritz View Post

    Hey folks I have an ongoing discussion with a guy in another forum and he postulated that static webpages will outrank blogs any time.

    He said something like - to rank a Wordpress blog you'd have to 'rip the code apart' to SEO it well. He claimed a well build static page will always outrank a CMS blog.

    I never heard this theory before, an he has not yet given chapter or verse yet. What do you say to this? Is there aný facts in his statement?
    Where did you find this crap? Many big news sites are WordPress. Yeah you need a plugin at the bare minimum because WP does a lot of stupid garbage by default.

    #1 Factor is relevant authority flow, that's inbound links that are relevant to your site linking to you.

    All in one/Yoast will fix most of the major problems w/ WP. The remaining things are relatively minor and stressing out about them is a waste of time, you're better off working on the user experience (Google renders the page and does an analysis, it's in the patents) or trying to do outreach on social media.

    Unless your site has 100k+ backlinks or is in an ultra competitive niche, then worrying about minor issues or ranking factors is a waste of your time. All of these factors have massive diminishing returns, just build a site that appears to visually be a quality site that is attractive and get people to it. It's going to be hard to get quality links if you don't already have traffic.

    Google is a search result popularity forecasting algorythm, there's tons of factors that Google can detect that send very strong signals to Google. The point of this isn't to try to get an "A+" in every category, you just want an A+ in anything that sends a strong popularity signal. So links and make sure your bounce rate isn't insane (not hard if the site is quality) but don't do silly things or have pages where you think "hmm a visitor might just immediately leave if they see this." Make sure you split test your layout and try to get traffic to flow across the site and you'll never have a bounce rate issue. Split test your social media buttons and opt in forms. Once you've built up some amount of fans it will be easy to get links, you'll already be known as a minor authority on social media.

    Don't over complicate this. Static sites are a massive pain and it's going to be very difficult to do the things you really need to do. How are you going to efficently do A/B testing with static pages? You know testing things over many variations can result in a net improvement of %200-%300 compared to the original. The difference in search traffic from #1 to #2 isn't 300%. If you're getting shared 300% more on social media you're beating the #1 site easily.
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    • Profile picture of the author Peter Stavrou
      Blog will always outrank a static html site which is why most static sites have blogs these days.

      Google loves fresh content and by posting new content on your site regularly ir keeps Google interested. For this reason Google sends it's crawlers to your website more often allowing your new content to get indexed quicker.

      With a blog you can also target more keywords, with a static website there are a limited number of keywords you can target.

      Note: I used Google as an example here but this applies with all Search Engines
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      • Profile picture of the author Jill Carpenter
        Originally Posted by Peter Stavrou View Post

        Blog will always outrank a static html site which is why most static sites have blogs these days.

        Google loves fresh content and by posting new content on your site regularly ir keeps Google interested. For this reason Google sends it's crawlers to your website more often allowing your new content to get indexed quicker.

        With a blog you can also target more keywords, with a static website there are a limited number of keywords you can target.

        Note: I used Google as an example here but this applies with all Search Engines
        I'm sorry, but I think this is horse pucky.

        You don't need to add a blog to a static site to add more content to it.

        Static sites can be done with simple upgrades to content on them when needed.

        You can always add more keywords (pages) to a static site.

        It's not always about new content - but more so authoritative content or specifically unique.

        Proper SEO on the site and off. Drive traffic appropriately.

        Wordpress vs html page SEO perspective - Stack Overflow


        https://www.quicksprout.com/2015/04/...ent-optimized/

        Blogging can be used as a means to pull in more traffic perhaps - but you won't necessarily rank higher just because you have a blog.
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        "May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"

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    • Profile picture of the author paulgl
      Originally Posted by irawr View Post

      Many big news sites are WordPress.
      I can't name a single one.

      No matter, the title is what one should answer.

      Blogs have pages. Other websites have pages.

      Whether they are built on the fly or not, they are pages.

      You rank the pages, not the website.

      What you think is the "website," is really the index page, or other landing page.

      You can rank things on a webpage or website, like images, videos, pdfs, etc.

      There is no difference to my blogs and regular websites. I add content on both
      on a regular basis.

      It would be big news if big news sites used wordpress instead of a pro CMS
      or in-house developed. I'm still chuckling on that one.

      Paul
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      If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.

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      • Profile picture of the author irawr
        Banned
        Originally Posted by paulgl View Post

        I can't name a single one.
        CNN (Used to be, not sure since redesign)
        NBC
        TIME
        LATIMES
        BUISNESSWEEK
        WIRED
        TECHCRUNCH
        BBC

        It's harder to find them now since most of them have moved their wp-admin location. (Go look yourself, some of them have not.) You would be surprised how many sites run WP (or WP VIP.) You can sometimes figure it out by reading their CSS files. To be clear, if you run caching, it doesn't matter what CMS you use at all. You're serving static pages. You can also mix the CMS with another CMS if you want to, since all the data is stored in a database. So you could have a Joomla frontpage with wordpress managing the content. (That sounds like a nightmare.)

        It's just code, the inhouse coders can do whatever they want with it. You just fork the codebase and disable all the auto update features. That's not even the right way to do it but you could.

        Why would a media outlet develop their own CMS inhouse? That sounds like a massive waste of resources. Why would they want to use a "PRO CMS?" That sounds like their dev team would require quite a bit of highly specialized knowledge and that knowledge would warrant high salaries and additional employees. If I owned a site that received a million visitors a day and I had 15 people contributing to the site, I would want it to be a CMS that many people are very familiar with. Every function in WP is hookable, you can completely alter the functionality of every single line of code without touching the codebase.
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    • Profile picture of the author WareTime
      Originally Posted by irawr View Post

      How are you going to efficently do A/B testing with static pages? You know testing things over many variations can result in a net improvement of %200-%300 compared to the original.
      An iRule in your F5 will do the trick nicely.

      I serve exclusively static pages. Much faster than some bloated ass blog software that is ridden with security holes and uses themes and plugins with more security holes and slowness.
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      • Profile picture of the author irawr
        Banned
        Originally Posted by WareTime View Post

        An iRule in your F5 will do the trick nicely.

        I serve exclusively static pages. Much faster than some bloated ass blog software that is ridden with security holes and uses themes and plugins with more security holes and slowness.
        That provides testing data how? LB would make testing more difficult, not less.

        Every site I run WP on is secured and serves static pages via a cache plugin. I've also never personally had a WP site hacked, as far as I'm aware of. When people get hacked it's usually an exploit involving old code that hasn't been updated in an eternity.

        "Bloated software" that's a few megabytes, 16gb of ECC memory is less than $100 now, and I doubt many people have a site that can't be completely memcached, which if your site isn't, then it's much slower then my WP sites. Your site even on SSDs raid 1 will not beat my memcached sites, sorry...

        If you're getting massive traffic and your db server can't handle the testing data writes then LB it and combine the data in excel or sync it during hours of low load.

        If your site routinely eats DDOS attacks I don't really have a solution for you since mine don't get hit by them.

        Sounds like you're wasting massive time.

        2010 or earlier, I'd agree with you.
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        • Profile picture of the author WareTime
          Originally Posted by irawr View Post


          2010 or earlier, I'd agree with you.
          Nope. It's 2016. The smart folks caught on to the fact that it's insane to hit a db every page load or at all for most content. Yes, you can use varnish and other caches, but lots of folks are completely separating serving from the CMS. They might use a CMS like Wordpress, but it gets output as static pages that get deployed atomically the server(s) in the web cluster and from there to the CDN.

          Static website generators are gaining in popularity again. They are not for the masses yet as they are not all gui and pushbutton affairs like wordpress, but for the individual or company with the right skills they a good choice.
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  • Profile picture of the author wawanjogja
    I never do that.. Just Focus to your visitor, give more value on your content
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  • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
    Originally Posted by rritz View Post

    Hey folks I have an ongoing discussion with a guy in another forum and he postulated that static webpages will outrank blogs any time.

    He said something like - to rank a Wordpress blog you'd have to 'rip the code apart' to SEO it well. He claimed a well build static page will always outrank a CMS blog.
    We've had couple of these on this forum too. I guess one of them got fed up after he repeatedly had his ass handed to him. The logic behind this line of arguing is usually pretty feeble.

    Is he talking about site speed? It's not such a major factor for a site that performs reasonably well, and there's several ways to speed up WP sites. It's just another PHP app, and there's a lot of options and tools in that space. The most basic caching which is enough for most sites is just a few mouse clicks away, and once you step up from the generic shared hosting you've got enough options to make your head spin.

    WordPress core does very little to SEO in any case, so "ripping the code apart" would not make much sense. What is he even hoping to achieve?

    I've been a WordPress site builder for more than five years. I'm not going to defend any of the clearly braindead areas of the CMS, but this is just a silly non-argument.
    Signature
    Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
    Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

    What's your excuse?
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    • Profile picture of the author irawr
      Banned
      Originally Posted by nettiapina View Post

      I've been a WordPress site builder for more than five years. I'm not going to defend any of the clearly braindead areas of the CMS, but this is just a silly non-argument.
      I'm pretty sure spam bots can leave you comments with "Allow people to post comments on new articles" unchecked. They might have fixed it. It might have been something stupid I did, I'm not sure, but I had comments turned off because I was using a disqus for comments. Every once in a while a bot would leave a comment through the WP comment system, I was very confused.
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      • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
        Originally Posted by irawr View Post

        I'm pretty sure spam bots can leave you comments with "Allow people to post comments on new articles" unchecked. They might have fixed it. It might have been something stupid I did, I'm not sure, but I had comments turned off because I was using a disqus for comments. Every once in a while a bot would leave a comment through the WP comment system, I was very confused.
        I'm not quite sure if they've fixed this very recently, but the bots just post directly to the comment script bypassing the actual comment form. This is why blogs that don't even have comment forms anywhere may still receive spam. In my opinion WordPress core should try to prevent this. After all, blogging and blog comments should be their strong area.

        I'm using iThemes Security to turn most of the useless crap off.
        Signature
        Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
        Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

        What's your excuse?
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  • Profile picture of the author rritz
    Well, it's very much as I thought, and thanks all for the answer. I mean, why would every marketer use WP if they couldn't rank the pages afterwards.
    Personally, I think WP is good but has lots of security issues - all my WP sites have been hacked several times over vs all my sites built with concrete5 have been unhacked for seven, eight years now.
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